Team:Washington/HP/Gold Integrated
Interviews in Seattle
Genetic engineering has become a hot-button issue in policy circles, and public perception of GMOs plays a large role of how our project may be accepted in our local community. Seattle is known for being a health-conscious city and many residents have a negative view of GMO foods. In 2014, legislation was passed in Washington State to require companies to label foods with GMO ingredients.
Because of these concerns about food production, we were especially interested to learn how our culture system would be perceived in regards to beer brewing. To find out, we conducted interviews at the Seattle Center, a popular hangout for tourists and residents alike, about their thoughts on genetic engineering.
People from near and far had many different opinions on GMOs and their uses, here are just a few:
However, regardless of their initial opinion, just about everyone agreed that testing products with GMOs was quite acceptable. These discussions indicated that the public is wary of genetically-engineered organisms being used in food or directly in food production, but is much more accepting of methods in which they are used on the back end of production, such as for testing.
Thus, instead of planning to scale up our Chromostat to large-scale bioreactors producing large amounts of beer or other materials, we expected our system to be used as a satellite culture, which can be correlated to production at scale but is itself a dead-end process, used for monitoring and optimizing conditions.
Interviews with Experts
To learn more about the applications of our system in brewing, we reached out to members of Seattle’s flourishing homebrewing community, as we expect that an affordable automated system would be useful to them. One of these homebrewers is Dr. Sean Sleight, a PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics with an interest in synthetic biology and its application to brewing.
“From my point of view... [in both] beer and [other] industry, if you can monitor...throughout the process, not only can you save money, but you can fine tune this process”
Link to Dr. Sleight's site: https://sleightbeerlab.com/
In September, we had the unique opportunity to discuss our project with Dr. Jennifer Doudna, who proposed the use of CRISPR/Cas9 for gene editing, when she came to give a lecture at our university. She suggested that a major hurdle in developing our system from a proof-of-concept in our lab to a useful tool in brewing and other manufacturing applications will be cell line differences between our laboratory yeast strains and strains used to make beer.
Listen to our interview with Dr. Doudna:
“I think that there is a lot of potential for [CRISPR] gene editing to have an impact industrially, part of the reason is that it opens doors to working with organisms that in the past were not genetically tractable”
These discussions helped solidify our goals and scope for this year’s project, directing our focus towards creating and testing our Chromostat system with non-biological dyes and the violacein pathway. Because we have built our system and made our parts and software open-source, future projects in our lab or others could focus on applying our design to more specific genetic pathways. These projects could solve problems such as relating production of non-colored metabolites to color production, engineering genetic pathways for production of useful molecules, and quantifying the correlation between small and large scale culture conditions.
Chromastat User Manual
Our user manual is currently a work in progress. Please find one of our members at the Jamboree to discuss its current status.
Reflection Survey
This year, we had the largest team in the history of iGEM at the University of Washington, with a consistent 34 undergraduates working on various aspects of the project. For the first time, this allowed us to seriously incorporate hardware and software development as well as wetlab, and allowed us to do more engagement and human practices work than in previous years.
However, with a larger team came some challenges in keeping all members up to date on the state of the project, short and long-term goals, and individual responsibilities. In order to better understand how members were receiving information, communicating within and with other subteams, and comprehending other parts of the project, we asked both wetlab and drylab members to complete surveys with questions about these issues. Analytics from these responses can be found below.
Our two teams communicated in very different ways:
But many people in both worked similarly:
Not surprisingly, drylab members worked more remotely than wetlab members:
After we collected the results of this survey, our teams met to discuss issues and were able to improve productivity greatly. Since the work of so many members was based purely on helping others, meetings focused on clarifying objectives and assigning everyone a role.
